Mairena del Aljarafe’s Parque Central, designed by EDDEA, opens as the Aljarafe’s great green lung

The Parque Central in Mairena del Aljarafe (Seville), designed by EDDEA’s team of architects, urban planners and landscape architects, has opened its gates following an investment of 5.1 million euros. The scale of the project makes it the great green lung of the Aljarafe area: 20 hectares of planted landscape that add to the 22 hectares of Parque Porzuna, also in the town.

Set between the Ciudad Expo and Los Alcores neighbourhoods, the new park has involved partially burying the bed of the Porzuna stream, which runs right through it, bringing a further 160 metres of its course to the surface. The aim of the intervention has been to restore the area environmentally and make it the focus of residents’ leisure activities.

To this end, six hectares of marginal land in the town have been regenerated and 70,000 cubic metres of earth moved. New infrastructure includes three timber footbridges, six kilometres of paths, five thousand square metres for events, some five hundred trees and a further two thousand shrubs, as well as three kilometres of cycle lane.

From an environmental and landscape perspective, the project has involved planting 500 new trees and 700 smaller specimens. This new planting, together with the trees planted along the nearby Ronda Sur, will remove 18,000 kilos of CO2 a year.

EDDEA’s design for the park, whose extension is already under study, comprises five themed zones, or islands, linked by paths and bridges. The Plaza de la Memoria – a welcome space for visitors and a venue for events – evokes the course of the Porzuna stream before it emerges in the park itself, leading on to the children’s island, the fitness island, the nature island and the dog island.

One of the main attractions is the children’s island, with play features such as the Torre Árbol (Tree Tower), a structure more than eight metres high with two slides reached from inside its trunk. Its interior will also light up at dusk, creating a tunnel-of-light effect that will make it doubly appealing to children.

Pupils representing the town’s twelve schools attended the opening, at which the mayor, Antonio Conde, expressed his “emotion after more than fifteen years of work to turn an urban void into the heart of the city, shaping Mairena socially as a friendlier city with sustainable mobility”.